3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

We are happy to invite you to a talk by artist Riet Wijnen about the curated selection she has made from the TEST PRESS archive for the exhibition + a presentation of the activities of PUB Sandberg & Rietveld Journal.

This is also the finissage of the exhibition!

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TEST PRESS is a display of student publications from the archive of designer, collector and teacher Henk Groenendijk. These publications have been produced by students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (NL) over a period of 20 years.
The publications in the archive have been collected as a byproduct to many years of teaching and balance on the fine line between the classroom and the world beyond education. They highlight a transition from what in the late 90s was referred to as ‘Dutch Design’, becoming more international and open, removed from an imposed national style. The archive is made up of more than 400 publications (often unique or produced in small print runs) and has a large variety of methods, aesthetics and topics ranging through language, typography, and contemporary visual culture to name a few.
For TEST PRESS, Henk Groenendijk is opening up this archive and putting it on full view. Within it are curated selections by a number of guests: Riet Wijnen (artist & curator, Amsterdam), Lies Ros (member of design studio Wild Plakken, Amsterdam), Åbäke (design collective, London/Paris), Kate Banar & Orin Bristow (graphic design graduates from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2019 & Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam 2018). Each selection offers its own, subjective view on the archive and in its own way proposes a different possibility of describing a canon. For the exhibition, a series of conversations filmed by Janna Meeus gives additional insight and reflection on the individual selections of the invitees.
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Riet Wijnen (1988, Venray, the Netherlands) is an artist based in Amsterdam who works mostly in the media of photography, sculptures, video, and text writing. In her work, she explores links between abstraction, perception, language, and structures through the historiography of abstraction in different fields: starting with early modernism in art and slowly moving towards science, philosophy and activism. This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction which Wijnen started in 2015.
She also publishes books and cahiers, such as Homophone Dictionary (2019, forthcoming), Grace Crowley (2019, forthcoming), Marlow Moss (2013) and Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014), Conversation One: A Preface (2015), Conversation Four: First Person Moving (2016), Conversation Six: Double (2018) and is working on The Registry of Pseudonyms, an on-going accumulation of pseudonyms on the website registryofpseudonyms.com. These books and the website are an integral part of Wijnen's practice, function independently, as sources and works at the same time. Wijnen’s solo exhibitions include Kunstverein, Milan (2020, forthcoming), Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2019), Lumen Travo, Amsterdam (2018), P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2016), Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2015), and archipelago, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2015). She participated in several groups shows among others at SculptureCenter, New York, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, and Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. Wijnen is currently teaching at the Graphic Design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
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TEST PRESS: 20 years of student publications (1999–2019)
A project by Henk Groenendijk, Elisabeth Klement and Matthias Kreutzer

exhibition open 25.01–29.02
at ENTER ENTER A Space for Books
Nieuwe Herengracht 11a, Amsterdam
at ENTER ENTER Thurs–Sat 12–17h

public programme on Saturdays, more info www.test-press.net

TEST PRESS was originally conceived on occasion of the exhibition 'Le Palais de la Maçonnerie Typographique' at Le Bel Ordinaire, The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published which collects transcripts of conversations with the guests and curators, as well as reproductions of the selected publications.